Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.
I only discovered Anna Daneshevskaya Beckerman’s music earlier this summer, upon the announcement of her forthcoming debut album Long Is The Tunnel. Daneshevskaya is a pre-school social worker by day, vocalist by night—and her record is shaping up to be one of my absolute favorite November releases. The singles we’ve heard so far—“Challenger Deep,” “Big Bird” and “Somewhere In The Middle”—have all blown me away, and that’s not something that has happened with every debut this year. Now, her final pre-release single, “ROY G BIV” (named after the acronym for the colors of the rainbow), is here and it’s even more magical than the previous three—if you can possibly believe that.
“ROY G BIV” was greatly influenced by Daneshevskaya’s day job. “We’re all in rainbow order, we’re all in rainbow order on the way down,” she sings. “This song was definitely inspired by working with kids and seeing how their worlds hinge upon small discrepancies,” Daneshevskaya says. “I always love when kids instinctually put things in order, and I could see a lot of the time how putting things in the right order calmed them. I think adults do that, too, in their own way.” The song pairs her saccharine singing with a methodical, well-paced piano melody. It’s not a ballad, but it’s not an anthem either. “ROY G BIV” is ebbing water that trickles into brief fragmentations of string arrangements. It arrives like an orchestral nursery rhyme, most immensely when Daneshevskaya sings “Horse and cow, pig and sheep, as long as I still get to sleep. Folding chairs start to sink as long as I can wet my beak.” It’s soothing and familiar, a token of intentionality and comparmentalization washed aglow by NYC serenity and anti-busyness. “ROY G BIV” won’t be leaving my rotation anytime soon.
Long Is The Tunnel is out November 10 via Winspear. Watch the visualizer for “ROY G BIV” below.